Armando Iannucci

Armando Iannucci: Pandemonium

25 min listen

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is Armando Iannucci – the satirist behind Alan Partridge, The Thick of It, Veep and The Death of Stalin. What many of his fans might not know is that he's also a devoted scholar of Milton – whose influence is to be found in his first published poem Pandemonium: Some Verses on the Current Predicament. Armando tells me what hurt him into verse, identifies the moment that led him to abandon an English Literature PhD for a career in comedy – and explains why there's as much sadness as savagery in his mock-epic description of the Covid epidemic.

Notebook | 28 September 2017

I’m currently dwelling on past times. I have a film coming out based on the crazy events that took place in 1953 when Stalin died. (He lay having a stroke on his rug and in his urine for hours since everyone was too scared to knock and see if he was all right.) We shot the film last summer. Then Trump happened. Now, journalists grill me as if the movie was an intentional response to that bloated troll’s election victory. Films take years to finance and write, and another year to shoot and edit; in that time, there’s no way anyone could have predicted the election of America’s first balloon-animal-inflated-by-potato-gas as President. Social media makes us take immediacy for granted.